Synthetic Peptides

Efforts to produce more stable and defined vaccines have concentrated on studying, in detail, the immune response to many infectious diseases in order to identify the antigenic sites on the pathogens that are involved in stimulating protective immumty. Armed with this knowledge, it is possible to mimic such sites by producing short chains of amino acids (peptides) and to use these as the basis for novel vaccines. The earliest documented work on peptide immunization is actually for a plant virus, tobacco mosaic virus. In 1963, Anderer (1 ) demonstrated that rabbit antibodies to an isolated hexapeptide fragment from the virus-coat protein coupled to bovine serum albumm would neutralize the infectious vn-us in culture. Two years later, he used a synthetically produced copy of the same peptide to confirm this observation. This was pioneering work, and it was over 10 years before the next example of a peptide that elicited antivirus antibody appeared following work by Sela and his colleagues (2 ) on a virus, MS2 bacteriophage, which infects bacteria. The emergence of more accessible techniques for sequencing proteins in 1977, coupled with the ability to synthesize readily peptides already developed in 1963, heralded a decade of intensive research into experimental peptide vaccines. The first demonstration that peptides could elicit protective immunity in vivo, in addition to neutralizing activity in vitro, was obtained using a peptide from the VP1 coat protein of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) in 1982, with the guinea pig as a laboratory animal model (3 , 4 ).